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World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

The Story of Jarnis the Troll Shaman in Northrend

Jarnis was a little Troll Shaman, Level 70. Jarnis wanted to be a big Troll Shaman, Level 80, so Jarnis got the expansion box and went to Northrend. This is the story of Jarnis.

Warning: Professional Gamer. Do Not Imitate. Take everything in moderation, even World of Warcraft.

Launch Day - All Prepared

For the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, I personally decided to go all-out with the "no-life" playstyle. In the afternoon of Wednesday the 12th of November, good seven hours before the game would officially go on sale I was already fully prepared - expansion installed, game box shelved, addons updated and UI configuration finalized. At this point I was already playing with "Wrath of the Lich King" client - you just couldn't tell any difference in the game until the servers would activate the expansion.

My account upgrade key was typed to Notepad, ready to be pasted to the account upgrade website as soon as the expansion went live. Last preparations were made - disenchanting old gear to make room in the bank, clearing up the quest log, completing a set of daily quests to be turned in as soon as the experience cap was lifted. Finally I logged off at Netherwing Ledge with the related quests complete. With about four hours to go, I decided to take a short nap, setting the alarm to go off 30 minutes before the expected launch time at midnight CET (1AM for me at CET+1).

I woke up almost two hours before the expected launch time - my brother was calling me to alert that Blizzard EU had jumped the gun with the expansion. The account upgrade page had gone up early, and a bit later people noticed that the login screen indicated that they could create a Death Knight. The Expansion was live - almost an hour before local stores could even officially sell boxes, almost two hours before the expected launch time!

I immediately upgraded my account with the product key (smooth as silk) and hopped online. I dashed across the Netherwing Ledge, quickly turning in all the old dailies for the last time before Astral Recalling to Shattrath City and heading to Isle of Quel'Danas for more daily quest turn-ins. After grabbing experience from all the Isle dailies, I had gained approximately 230k experience in about ten minutes - less than 20% of a level, but hey, every little bit helps. Then it was time for a Hearthstone back to Outland, portal to Undercity and head for the zeppelin to Northrend. I placed my bets on the idea that most of the people would obviously head for the Orgrimmar zeppelin as that's the Horde travel hub in the old world, so I chose Undercity as my starting point in an attempt to avoid crowds that would slow down my progress.

Waiting for transport - apparently there was some risk involved...

Boarding the Zeppelin to Howling Fjord

Considering that I was boarding the zeppelin at approximately 22:30 CET, it was surprising to see so many people on board. I guess plenty of people received their mail order copies already on Wednesday. Zeppelins were acting up a bit - half the people got to Howling Fjord while the other half ended up high above Stonetalon Mountains and had to do a long trip back to try again. Annoying, but after repeated attempts people were getting through - some guild mates cursed how they had to do three trips to Stonetalon Mountains before the server was happy to ship them to Northrend, but I got through on the first attempt.

Northrend - Vengeance Landing

"Hello Northrend! It's been a while." I participated in the closed beta of Wrath of the Lich King, so the area was familiar to me, but I had passed through the early zones back in August, almost three months ago. It would be interesting to see what had changed and how the player feedback had touched the expansion.

The initial area of Vengeance Landing was already crawling with people fighting over spawns related to the first batch of quests - I had missed the first boat by about 20 minutes. I stuck to my original plan and after grouping up with my brother's Undead Rogue, we headed out of the landing area and off to west for the next quest hub.

Completely fresh and untouched lands! No other player had touched these areas on the server before! We hammered on as a duo for a couple of hours, working our way to level 71 in one mad rush around the Fjord. Somewhere along the way we got the first server-wide announcement - someone with a fishing rod and a noticeable lack of life had just gained the server first for 450 skill in fishing! I can only guess that whoever got that had immediately gone fishing the moment he set foot in Northrend as you can get that by just repeatedly fishing anywhere for a few hours as soon as you have unlocked the skill cap at the first village.

It took hours before we met other people as we were "surfing ahead the wave" of the players questing in the area. We actually had to compete with others only just before we were ready to head out to the next zone (Dragonblight). Along the way my brother had skinned everything we had killed and due to the ease of leveling up gathering professions, he was already at over 440 skill. As the skill cap approached, we wondered if he would be server first - only to see another player hitting 450 for that Feat of Strength fifteen minutes later. Had we just hopped over to Grizzly Hills and killed stuff there for a bit to get him the last few points a bit faster with higher level carcasses he would've been server first. Opportunity lost - too bad - but we were here to level, not skill up our tradeskills.

At this point I noticed that the highest level players on the server were already over a level ahead of me - at level 73 when I was about to hit 71. I did some math and came to unfortunate conclusion - questing as a duo was simply not viable for rapid leveling. Too much time was lost during traveling while waiting for the other guy and more was lost while waiting for respawns of camps clearly designed for soloing. Too often we had a quest saying "kill these monsters and loot 5 thingys", while the target area containing 9 monsters dropping exactly 5 quest items in total. Fine when questing alone, completely sucky when trying to rapidly level as a duo. As monsters tended to die in 3-4 hits due to the epic gear we were using, the extra killing power of two people was just not offsetting the loss of time due to other factors.

The only other viable way to race towards 80 was to have a group of 5 and repeatedly do instances and I didn't have enough friends online yet to do that - and besides, repeatedly grinding same instances would quickly get boring.

To Dragonblight!

After hitting 71 after a bit over five hours of non-stop play it was time for a short break - and once I had grabbed an early breakfast, I made the decision that if I would want to continue on the race to 80 among the first on the server, I would have to go on solo. My brother had decided to take a nap, so I sprinted onwards to Dragonblight. By mid-morning on Thursday I was 72. By afternoon the level indicator dinged to 73 and approximately 24 hours after launch I was already on level 74 and had unlocked the access to Dalaran - the neutral capital city of Northrend.

The early levels were a blur - I kept trying to rush forward, skipping some quest lines just to get out of the early areas of Dragonblight so I wouldn't have to compete with others for quest-related spawns and mostly succeeded in doing that. I knew that once I was past the first two zones - Howling Fjord and Dragonblight, I would be "out of the woods" as anyone without serious beta experience or massive pre-planning would most likely spend more time on the first two zones than I did - even if it was not strictly required to access higher level content in Grizzly Hills and Zul'Drak.

By level 74 it was clear - I had beaten the crowds! Sadly some guild mates were complaining loudly how every quest-related camp was being fought over by dozens of players back in Howling Fjord and in Borean Tundra, the other starter zone. The big crowd had bought the game on Thursday and the server was full of people when Thursday prime time hit - most of them playing in just two zones.

Amazingly, the server held up - in fact, it worked absolutely perfectly. There was one quick server restart during the wee hours of Thursday morning but no crashes, no lag and no bugs... the only issues were with the zeppelins (all cured by Thursday) and with login queues. There were so many people trying to get on the server that by Thursday night I heard that my server had a login queue of over 1000 people (over two hours). Not really an issue for some of us - I just avoided logging out.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Road to Level 80 - Part 1Page 3: Road to Level 80 - Part 2Page 4: Road to Level 80 - Part 3Page 5: Gameplay, FeaturesPage 6: Features, cont.Page 7: Raids, EndgamePage 8: Visuals, PerformancePage 9: The Annoying BitsPage 10: Conclusions, Scoring

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